James Dean was little more than a boy when he
died, killed at twenty-four on the highway near Paso Robles,
California, on September 30, 1955, while on his way to a sports
car meet. At the time of his death, Dean had completed three
movies, East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant, only the
first of which had been released.

Dean was already an actor of promise, and his
death was front-page news. It was the Eisenhower-Ben Gurion era--a time of
peace and prosperity-when young people were expected to respect
their elders and obey the rules. But even during his short life,
Dean was widely known as a nonconformist-a rebel who had taken
Hollywood by storm and who did as he pleased.

For young people coming of age, Dean was
someone they could easily identify with: an outsider, a loner--he
was the antithesis of everything a well-behaved youth was
supposed to be. His screen portrayals symbolized the
rebelliousness of adolescence. In public he was often rude, even
surly. A fan magazine quoted him as saying, "I wouldn't like
me, if I had to be around me." He had been known to fight
with directors and storm off the set. "Jimmy knew what young
people were up against," an admirer once said. "He
understood." Later, someone else referred to him as
"the first student activist."

From the day of his death, it seemed that young
people would not let Dean die. A special fan mail agency had to
deal with the deluge of mail that poured into the studio. Many of
the letters were addressed to the dead star.

A record, His Name Was Dean, put
out on a small label, sold twenty-five thousand copies in a
single week. Mattson's, a Hollywood clothing shop, received
hundreds of orders for red jackets identical to the one Dean had
worn in Rebel Without a Cause, and Griffith Park, where scenes
from the movie were shot, became almost overnight a tourist
attraction. Admirers lined up inside the Observatory, hoping to
sit in the same seat Dean had used in the film. "It's like
Valentino," a reporter told Henry Ginsberg, the coproducer
of Giant, Dean's last movie, referring to the craze that had
swept the nation after the Italian actor's death in the 1920s.
Ginsberg disagreed, "It's bigger than Valentino."

Some fans refused to believe that Dean was
really dead. Walter Winchell printed in his column the rumor that
Dean was disfigured but still alive. Other stories insisted that
it had been a hitchhiker and not Dean who had been killed and
that the actor was in hiding while learning to operate his
artificial limbs or that he had been placed in a sanitarium.

Hollywood, of course, had always been a
commercial enterprise: Dean's popularity was not lost on the
moguls who had built the industry. Jack Warner admitted:
"That kid Dean...gave us a lot of trouble, but it was worth
it. He was surrounded with stars in Giant, but we believe he was
twenty-five percent responsible for the success of the
picture." (Cecil Beaton, Cecil Beaton's Fair Lady, New York, Holt,
1964) Aided by studio press releases, fan magazines printed stories with titles
like, You Can Make Jimmy Dean
Live Forever and The Boy Who Refuses to Die.

Not everyone, however, was enthusiastic about
Dean. Herbert Mitgang, of The New York Times, dismissed him as
"an honor graduate of the black leather jacket and
motorcycle school of acting and living it up." And director
Elia Kazan, Dean's mentor, claimed: "Every boy goes through
a period when he's seventeen or so when he hates his father,
hates authority, can't live within the rules. . . It's a classic
case. Dean just never got out of it."

Dean's recklessness and commitment to having
lived his life to the fullest had its appeal as well. "All
adolescents," wrote Martin Mayer in Esquire, "want to rope
steers...and sculpt busts of famous novelists and drive a custom
sports car and write poetry and be a great Hollywood star. Dean
did it.... In a way, the kids feel he did it all for them."
He was, moreover, the one hero who would never sell out. He would
never have a chance to.

A few of Dean's close friends refused to take
part in the hysteria--or cash in on the enterprise. Dennis Stock,
a young photographer, remembers being invited to dinner by
another photographer, Sanford Roth, after Dean's death. Roth had
been the still photographer on Giant and had shot numerous poses
of Jimmy both on and off the set. When Stock arrived, he assumed
that he and the Roths would spend a quiet evening reminiscing
about their gifted friend. But when he realized the Roths had
invited a newspaper reporter who was doing a story on Dean, Stock
got up and left. "It was a publicity setup," he
recalled with disdain.

In a sense, however, Dean had almost invited
the reaction that followed his death. "He was a boy with a
wonderful sense of the theater," director George Stevens
said. As a farmboy, in high school, Jimmy had been a show-off; in
Hollywood, he cultivated his offbeat image with the press. After
making East of Eden, Dean excused his obnoxious public behavior
by telling an interviewer, "I can't divert into being a
human being when I've been playing a hero, like Cal, who's
essentially demonic." On another occasion, he explained:
"A neurotic person has the necessity to express himself and
my neuroticism manifests itself in the dramatic..." He
was-cool; the perfect quote was always on his lips.

Humphrey Bogart, who also knew a thing or two
about image making, once said: "Dean died at just the right
time. He left behind a legend. If he had lived, he'd never have
been able to live up to his publicity." (Richard Gehman, Bogart, New
York, Gold Medal Books, 1965)

A Rebel for all seasons.

But Dean did not live and in death became
transformed into a myth: Even today, visitors come from all over
to visit his grave in Fairmount, Indiana, the small farming
community where Dean grew up. In one recent year, there were over
six thousand visitors, some from as far away as Argentina and
Australia. Dean's handsome, brooding face adorns posters and
T-shirts. A licensing company, run by lawyers, markets James Dean
calendars, postcards, and ashtrays around the world.

Over the years, an impressive list of actors
and performers have claimed to have been influenced by him: Bob
Dylan, Al Pacino, Martin Sheen, Michael Parks, the late Jim
Morrison, poet and lead singer for the Doors, who lived fast and
died hard, just like one of his heroes, James Dean.

Dean's life has been the subject of novels,
plays, even a song by the Beach Boys entitled, A Young Man
Is Gone. But not every writer has been adoring. In 1993,
George Will, the respected conservative columnist, blamed Dean
and his film personality for the youthful unrest that convulsed
the country in the 1960s. Will wrote: "In Rebel Dean played
himself--a mumbling, arrested-development adolescent-to
perfection. Feeling mightily sorry for himself as a victim (of
insensitive parents), his character prefigured the whiny,
alienated, nobody-understands-me pouting that the self-absorbed
youth of the sixties considered a political stance."

But Dean was a many-sided figure; the sullen
young man was only one facet of his personality. He was creative,
intellectually curious, and ambitious, as well as manipulative
and extremely selfish. Many actors who actually worked with him
disliked him--and rued the experience. One actor who worked with
Dean on TV recalled decades later that Jimmy had been vulgar,
self-congratulatory, and rude. "His movements on stage were
far removed from the carefully rehearsed planned positions,"
the actor, Vaughn Taylor, recalled. This created "havoc with the other
actors' performances and for the director. The result was
pandemonium for everyone except Mr. Dean and his sick ego."
This comment is all too typical and an ironic epitaph for an
actors' icon.

Moreover, not all of Dean's friends found him
loyal. After Jimmy had achieved success, a struggling young
photographer to whom Dean had reason to be grateful asked him to
go halves on a used camera. Dean refused. "I can get all the
new equipment I want," he said callously. Alas, this was not
the only friend Jimmy left behind after his rapid rise to fame.

In the years since Dean's death, there has been
much speculation about his rumored bisexuality. In fact, women
were strongly attracted to him, and he engaged in numerous
affairs. At one point, in New York, he was simultaneously having
affairs with a wealthy debutante and a beautiful high school
girl.

the legend--forever

A few Dean friends continue to deny his
homosexuality, despite conclusive evidence to the contrary. After
reading a draft of this manuscript, actor Martin Landau refused
to be interviewed, saying: "This guy was not gay." Dennis Hopper has
made the same claim. Only
one of Dean's homosexual relationships is dealt with in this
book--and that in his early days in Hollywood and New York with a
director named Rogers Brackett.

Brackett was a well-connected figure in
Hollywood; the son of a Hollywood pioneer, he knew everyone from Marlene
Dietrich to Henry Miller. He got Dean small parts in three Hollywood movies and
later helped him land his first starring role on Broadway in See the Jaguar which was produced by Lem Ayers, a member of the smart gay circle that swirled around Brackett.

After Dean's death, Rogers regularly refused
press interviews about him and turned down biographers' requests.
His own attainments were considerable: a witty, cultivated man,
he had directed stage plays and had written lyrics for a popular
Alec Wilder song. Brackett had no desire to be regarded as an
appendage to his famous protégé. In his wry way, Rogers would say that he
"had other fish to fry."

Toward the end of his own life, however, when
he was stricken with cancer, Rogers granted me the only
interviews he ever gave on Dean. He was tired of the
"half-truths" that had been published and wanted
"to set the record straight." This book draws on those
interviews and the letters he wrote me; many of the items are
published here for the first time, since Rogers requested that
they be withheld until after his death.

As we approach the
fiftieth anniversary of
Dean's death, however, neither his sexuality--nor the quirks in
his personality-make much difference to his ever-growing legion
of fans: Bikers and mall rats, poets and rockers revere him as
much today as teenagers did a generation ago. To them, he is what
he is: a rebel for all seasons.

Ultimately, it seems, as long as there are
young people, so long as there are boundaries, Dean will live-and
the legend will endure.

(The James Dean Story was originally published in
paperback in 1975 and was reissued in hardback in 1995. This introduction was
written for the new edition. Ron can be reached at
amlegends@aol.com.)